Crime and Punishment Book Review

By Omar Andre

Book Summary

Dostoevsky's crime and punishment is a psychological thriller and philosophical fiction, it is exploration of morality, guilt and redemption told through the story of Raskolnikov, a broke former student living in St.Petersburg. After he had to drop out of university due to poverty, he began spiraling. Raskolnikov is overtaken by an uncontrollable and constant urge to commit an unspecified crime he believes would be both beneficial to him and morally justified. Raskolnikov weaves between finding this idea utterly repugnant and being completely absolved by the thought of going through with it, before finally forever giving it up. Right after giving it up, Raskolnikov finds a very tempting opportunity to go through with the crime, his idea overtakes him again and he commits the crime in an almost psychotic state. Almost immediately after this incident Raskolnikov falls into a deep sickness and he becomes unconscious for a couple days. The book then follows Raskolnikov as he navigates both the physical and psychological repercussions of his crime, while exploring different characters with different things to say about morality and society.

Characters

All of the characters in Crime and Punishment are well written and most of them are interesting. Raskolnikov, the protagonist, is a complex protagonist, he's a troubled individual and trying to figure out what's going on with him was part of the appeal to me. He has an interesting relationship with fate that I found particularly compelling and worth exploring. His psychotic state can, especially in the beginning, be somewhat annoying to read, but it is part of his character and it leads up to something in the story. The other side characters are quite interesting as well. Raskolnikov's university friend Razumihin is also an interesting character, he frequently breaks into long dialogues about his opinions, and his generally very open personality contrasts nicely with Raskolnikov's expression through inner dialogues. Raskolnikov's family is a quite big part of the plot since the beginning, their plot points and dialogue comment on wealth and they add more depth to Raskolnikov's character overall.

The one difficulty I had with the characters in this novel is that sometimes names are a lot to keep track of. For starters names, as you can see with Raskolnikov's names, quite uncommon names, but there's a bigger issue than that. Characters don't refer to each other consistently. For example, our protagonist, Raskolnikov, is introduced as such; later, he gets a letter from his mother, which refers to him as Rodya, with this we can assume that his name is Rodya Raskolnikov, but later, around a third of the novel through, we find out that his real name is Rodion. This is a relatively trivial and a very easy example to follow while reading the book, but there are some worse offenders that I had to go back and try to figure out to whom they were referring to. Another issue is that there are quite a few characters introduced, and you don't really know what details you have to remember about each character in order to not be lost in the future. Both of these things do add to the realism of the novel because different people call each other by different names and because everyone refers to each other by names, but it can get quite annoying at times, and I would recommend keeping a character list as to not struggle with understanding the novel.

Enjoyment

I overall enjoyed the novel, but it was a bit slow to pick up. The beginning's pacing feels a bit slow and the lead-up to "the crime" feels unnecessarily long, but it's nothing too outrageous and right after that the book picks up the pace. My favourite part of the book was Raskolnikov's inner dialogue. Everyone else seems to have an at least clear-ish role in the novel, but Raskolnikov's mental state and overall personality, as well as his relationship with fate makes him kind of a mystery. Unraveling his mystery through his interactions, inner thoughts and interactions with his family was a very enjoyable time.

Closing

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys psychological fiction of any kind, it is a very well written book and there's a lot of characters with interesting things to say. I would give a warning to anyone wanting to read this book about the amount of names you have to remember. If you don't have great memory, I would recommend keeping a character sheet with all their aliases.

I quite enjoyed this book, and I would overall give it a 4/5